Bloom in Adversity
by Toomanybooks16
Summary: Annabeth misses Percy. Series of PJO and HoO drabbles and one-shots.
1. Infinite

**1. Infinite **

In the cool quiet dark of her room, there is a light - not the light at the end of the tunnel, or any overtly death-related notion; just a light, a cheap-looking desk lamp with a too-bright fluoro tube that somehow is angled to still not cast enough light. The desk it casts that light over is cluttered with all the spoils of life and growing up, and a few things that shouldn't really be there but are, for whatever reason is enough for her. An ancient recipe stand, found at a garage sale in the next street, takes pride of place, filled with a mess of notebooks and loose sheets of paper, and a periodic table with most of the actinides missing. A crossword torn from a magazine rests before her - tossed aside temporarily, it's ripped edges fluttering slightly in the chilly breeze from the near-black window.

Two alarm clocks sit dangerously close to the edge of the desk, gathering dust. Miscellaneous stationery fills jars and caddies and overflows onto the desk, spreading everywhere and getting lost and found and lost again. A chipped trophy, a broken jewellery box, and an old hand painted piggy bank sit somewhere off to the side, to be dealt with when she finds the time.

A camera with no batteries and a stick of purple zinc occupy gaps, as if trying to find a place where they will be wanted and used, instead of left behind and forgotten in the wave of modern technology and phones and general coolness that takes away the need for purple zinc. An enormous pile of paperwork - everything from assignment sheets to Polaroid photos to stencils to lists of just about everything to teaspoons. A dictionary and a thesaurus lurk in the corners, as if ashamed to be somewhere they are used so rarely.

A drink coaster and a placemat are somewhere under the jumble of paper and pens, for when she has to eat at the desk - something that is becoming all too common in her busy rushed world. On the coaster, which bears a lemon and the word CITRUS, sits a mug of hot chocolate. Once she would have said the mug is half full - sometimes she'll now say that it is half empty, but mostly she will avoid the argument and merely state that the liquid comes halfway to the top.

Finally, hidden behind her laptop, difficult to see behind the glow of the screen, is a shot glass. It contains only an inch of water, not alcohol, but it is a reminder of what many young people her age - many of those her friends - are doing with their time. She prefers to sit and think, and read, write, and dream, and worry. Worry for him, because she loves him. Worry for the rest of the world, because if he's gone, what is left? What is out there, coming towards her, or even him? The cool quiet dark of her room breeds worry, but only because it is a thinking space, and worry is a thought, and the cool quiet dark fosters other thoughts too, of every kind; not only the nasty ones. Dark does not spawn dark. She has had this cool quiet dark as her space for a long time now, and she is not dark.

She twiddles a stray piece of sticky-tack between her fingers, stretching it, twisting it, and remembers something a very wise man once told her - "Some infinities are bigger than other infinities." She has never thought too much about infinity before, because the idea of something that huge rather scares her, but she likes the idea that infinity has a size, and a changing size at that. She only hopes that her infinity can go on a little longer.

* * *

Months later, after she has found out what happened to him, and found him, and judo-flipped him to the group for scaring her like that, she decides that maybe infinity isn't so scary after all, if she can have one with him. She resolves to make her bedroom warmer and lighter next time she is in it.

* * *

_Disclaimer - I own nothing. The characters belong to Uncle Rick, and the quote near the end to John Green, who I think is wise (even if he may need to grow a beard and get some better glasses before the rest of the world will realise). Most of the stuff on the desk is mine, though I don't I can claim any credit for that._


	2. Different

**2. Different**

_We're all little weird, and life's a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them, and form a mutual weirdness called love. -Dr. Seuss_

He is terrified - more than anything else - of being the same as everyone else. When he is small, his mother whispers to him how special and unique he is, and hearing that gets him through being called a freak at kindergarten. When he moves through a succession of foster homes, he thinks about this a lot. Foster homes, for anyone who wants to know, are not fun at all, unless you strike lucky with your family. He went through too many foster homes in seven years, and got lucky once - but of course, it didn't last, because their two daughters were almost grown up, and then they moved out, and their father had a heart attack, and it just got too hard to look after a little Spanish foster kid who did actually have somewhere else to go. But for a short while there, he had three mothers and a father, all for one little kid with elf-like ears and an obsession with building things and all the small pieces of anything mechanical he could find to try to make into something new - but never what it used to be. He obsesses slightly over the idea of new things - nothing ever that same.

At another foster home, a few years later, he was sitting down to the dinner table with the three other foster children in the home, when he was served up a plate of scrambled eggs - an odd dinner food, but simple and quick and the kind of thing he had learnt to expect in this home, with the harried mother of five (with four foster children and a a full-time job to worry about) the only adult trusted to cook. He started eating hungrily but somehow mechanically, but stopped suddenly when he tasted it. The scrambled eggs were exactly the same as his mother used to make after a long day at the workshop. He ate them faster than he had eaten anything put in front of him for dinner since he arrived in the foster home. When he left there a few months later, they were the only thing he missed.

In all those years, he never managed to make any real friends his own age at his foster homes - he buddied up with some kids at school, but the friendship never lasted, although he did convince one girl that sliding down the roof of the gym into the sandpit was a good idea (the friendship lasted past the apology, but his current foster parents' patience for his pranks did not).

He does those things - convincing people to slide down roofs - because he wants to be noticed. If he is in trouble and his foster parents come to the school, at least they will be paying attention to him and him alone, not their real family or the other foster child in the home. He hates the idea that someone can blend into the background and not be noticed.

Even at (school with Piper) he was different, standing out from the school of misfits and juvenile deniliquents.

He likes having teachers and police officers yell at him. It means he is being singled out, just for the sake of being Leo, for being himself. It is exactly what he is after.

* * *

When he thinks about Calypso, he thinks that maybe, just maybe, he is special to her too. After all, the other heroes sent to her island didn't have the same that he has. She would fall in love with them straight away, and then watch them go with the knowledge that they were sailing away from her, back to their lady-love - someone who will always take priority to her.

For him, perhaps he was unique. She hated him at first, then grew to like and maybe love (love?) him. Most of all, there was no-one for him to go back to. Hazel was lovely, but she was very much Frank's, and not his. She was different from any girl he had known, which he liked, and she liked him, which he loved. He thought of her rather a lot, hoping that there would be time afterwards for them to be different; together.

* * *

_A/N: __So this is Leo (after the end of HoH), sometime isn the beginning of BoO if it comes out like I am thinking it will._

_I have the Dr. Seuss quote above my desk - it is one of my many favourites._

_Disclaimer: I own nothing_

_Unfortunately, this will only be updated as I have a) time and b) inspiration, so if anyone wants to help me with the latter, you are very welcome! __If anyone has anything they would like to see, let me know in a review or PM - particularly if it has plot instead of character introspection, my ideas are very thin on the ground at the moment!_


End file.
